Thursday, March 02, 2017

Beauty And The Beast...And The Obligatory Gay Sidekick!

When it was announced that the beloved animated movie Beauty and the Beast was going to be remade into a live action (plus CGI I guess) film I was cautiously optimistic. My wife enjoyed the animated version and although it was pretty PC even back in the day, I had hopes from the original trailers that it would stay true to the story despite Emma Watson playing Belle (more on that in a second). For our recent anniversary I even made up a fake coupon she could redeem to have me take her when the movie came out, me thinking that it might be a nice movie to see and I would forsake my regular policy of refusing to subsidize Hollywood churning out movies that celebrate what God hates and that mock what God loves.

I guess not.

Reports surfaced yesterday that the character of LeFou, chubby sidekick of villain Gaston (who is a hunter of course, because they are obviously evil), is going to be portrayed as a homosexual. In a Disney film. Because that is where we have sunk to as a "culture". In the reports, the director of the film, Bill Condon, describes this move in breathless fashion:

In an interview with Attitude magazine, director Bill Condon said: ‘LeFou is somebody who on one day wants to be Gaston and on another day wants to kiss Gaston.

‘He’s confused about what he wants. It’s somebody who’s just realising that he has these feelings. It is a nice, exclusively gay moment in a Disney movie.’

Mr Condon said the character, played by Josh Gad, is part of a ‘watershed moment’ for Disney. He said: ‘The studio is sending out a message that this is normal and natural – and this is a message that will be heard in every country of the world, even countries where it’s still socially unacceptable or even illegal to be gay.’

It will be a watershed indeed, if by watershed you mean the latest move to degrade our culture. Slipping homosexuality and other deviant behavior into popular entertainment to try to normalize it is not unusual (apparently the new Alien movie, Alien: Covenant, features a ship full of couples who are going to populate a new planet and includes a gay couple. Um, how are two homosexual guys going to populate a new world? Another movie to pass on.). What is somewhat unusual is how open and bold they are about it. It is a "nice, exclusively gay moment", a specifically designed move to make a point. The point is, like he said, to tell kids at a young age who want to see a fun movie with a classic story that homosexuality is "normal" and "natural" even though it is absolutely neither of those things. I am not denying that homosexuality exists, it obviously does, or even that there are a lot of people who practice homosexual behavior, because there are, although in nowhere near the numbers the media would have you believe. That doesn't make it "normal" and it doesn't make it "natural". If I can be graphically blunt here a moment, there is nothing much more unnatural and abnormal than a man looking at another man and desiring to sodomize him or be sodomized by him. That sounds mean to say but when you stop playing word games and emotional shenanigans, that is ultimately what is being portrayed by this character. He doesn't want to give Gaston a simple kiss, he apparently desires to have deviant sexual intercourse with him. Since God designed sexuality to be male and female, when two males decide to engage in intercourse they have to find a substitute which is by nature unnatural. There is a reason that popular movies show male-female intercourse so commonly and often graphically but not male-male deviant sexual behavior. Simply put, most audiences are not sufficiently conditioned to it. Yet. The average person sees simulated normal intercourse portrayed in a movie, setting aside how unhealthy it is to watch this for entertainment purposes, and can understand it. I get why a man wants to be intimate with a woman, it makes sense. But even seeing two men kiss is still enough to turn the stomach of most people and the idea of watching two men sodomizing each other is grotesque. The visceral reaction of people is not because they are bigoted or indoctrinated by religion, it is because instinctively normal people understand homosexual behavior to be aberrant and unnatural.

But it will be in more and more movies and TV shows, you can be sure of that. Between normalizing homosexual behavior in mass media and the elites screaming bigotry at anyone who doesn't get on board, it is little wonder the needle keeps moving on what our culture accepts as normal. Notice here that the character chosen is comedy relief, which matches well with the normal pattern of presenting homosexuals in harmless roles. See gays are funny and dress nicely and know how to decorate. How bad can homosexuality be? The reality is much darker.

So while I am not surprised at all by this move from Disney, it is still kind of sad. It is simply the latest sign that our entertainment industry is almost entirely a political and religious movement that is driving an agenda that normalizes destructive behavior. Sadly I was forced to cancel my wife's coupon, at her urging. We will do something else fun to continue to celebrate our marriage rather than subsidizing perversion being portrayed at "natural" and "normal".

As a postscript, the article I referenced also talks about Watson's take on the character of Belle:

Miss Watson is also making the leading role of Belle more feminist. Once a dreamy bookworm, Belle has been transformed into an inventor.

Can one not be a "feminist" who loves to read? You have to turn a female character into an early STEM scholar because audiences are too stupid to understand your point unless you pummel them with it? As my wife pointed out to me yesterday when we read this article, in the original film (and I assume the remake), Belle offers to take the place of her father as the Beast's prisoner even though he is old and she is young and has her whole life ahead of her. Her actions are selfless and courageous. They place the well-being of another over that of herself. That is what true feminine strength looks like. Belle's actions in the film are already something that should inspire young women and girls to show strength through self-sacrifice and courage. That is the heart of feminine strength, which should be what feminism is about, but of course we don't get that.